Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  [Even after he didn’t get the role in Ziegfeld Girl’s 1938 reprise, Ford phoned Lana again during his filming of Texas (1941), with the equally handsome William Holden, who became his best pal.

  “Talk about two gorgeous guys new to Hollywood,” Lana told Hyde. “Glenn talked to Bill Holden about me. Those guys wanted me to join them for a three-way in Palm Springs.” Then with a pout, she added, “But I refuse to tell you if I accepted their tantalizing offer.”

  ***

  Flo Ziegfeld had been the most flamboyant showman in the American theater. Night after night, he glorified “The American Girl” (or the American concept of beauty) in glittering, glamorous settings, with an armada of female pulchritude attired in stunning, artfully outrageous, extravagant costumes. His Ziegfeld Follies, a lavish annual revue, attracted vast audiences during their heyday [roughly speaking, from 1907 To 1931]. In his glory years, he seduced as many of his actresses as he could get around to.

  William Anthony McGuire had written the original Oscar-nominated The Great Ziegfeld, (1936) and he was called back to write a new script, but he died before shooting began in September of 1940.

  Censors from the Breen Office cracked down on many of the lines from the 1940 script. In what they considered a generous concession, however, they allowed the character played by Dan Dailey to refer to Sheila as a “tramp.”

  As filming advanced, Lana, Garland, and Lamarr became very competitive. At one point, Garland complained to Leonard. “When Lana bounces by, the electricians whistle; when Hedy sweeps in, the grips stare lasciviously. But when I go by, it’s ‘Hi, Judy!’”

  One day, Joe Pasternak, the film producer, perhaps during the period when he was debating whether he should officially migrate over to MGM, visited the set. On site, he closely observed the interactions of Garland, Lamarr, and Lana. “Judy didn’t realize how much talent she had or that she had more to offer than Hedy or Lana, or even Joan Crawford. Judy never believed that she had the strength, I mean feminine strength. She felt she was a failure in her private life. Talk about failures! In their private lives, Lana, Hedy, and Joan were each disastrous, despite their triumphs on the screen.”

  Mickey Rooney arrived to visit Garland on the set. Although Lana did not exit from her dressing room to see him that day, he talked animatedly to Garland, his frequent co-star.

  “If I looked like Lana,” Garland said with more than a touch of envy, “I could have any man I wanted. Mostly I have to dream about them: Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, even Robert Taylor—I mean especially Robert Taylor. Lana represents the epitome of female beauty. As for me, men call me pretty and give me a pat on the chin.”

  On the set, although Garland and Lana pretended to be friends, Garland could hardly mask her jealousy. Lana had already snatched Artie Shaw from her arms, and now she was making a play for Tony Martin, even though Garland also had a crush on the singer, in spite of David Rose being in her life.

  Garland’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, wrote, “If Lana Turner could club-hop every night, why couldn’t Judy? She was tired of being regarded as the kind of girl a boy might safely take home to the family. What she wanted was to be a seductress, a temptress who could look into a man’s eyes and cause him to reel with lust and longing, abandoning everything for just one delirious night with her. She wanted to smile at Artie Shaw, as Turner had done, and cause him to tootle to her tune and her tune alone. She wanted, in short, to be Lana Turner.”

  At last, Lana was working with producer Pandro S. Berman, who, during his reign at RKO, had produced the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals and was a prime fixture in the rise of Katharine Hepburn at the studio. He’d also just released such classics as Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1939. She later referred to Berman as “a darkly handsome dynamo, gruff and irascible.”

  Ziegfeld Girls are, left to right: Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Hedy Lamarr. The film traces the triumphs and tragedies of these three showgirls: Lana as Sheila Regan, Garland as Susan Gallagher, and Lamarr as Sandra Koller. The trio was billed as “the three B’s,” a blonde, a “bronzetta,” and a brunette.

  Berman felt he really had to succeed in producing Ziegfeld Girl as a means of proving to Mayer that he could make spectacular films for Metro, the same way he had for RKO. He told Lana, “Pull this one off, baby, and you’ll have a breakthrough film. If you do, it will mean only starring roles for you in your future.”

  [Berman came close to casting Lana in another film, Madame Bo-vary (1949), based on the Flaubert classic. He met with director Vincente Minnelli, and they agreed that Lana might be perfect for the role.

  However, the Breen Office objected, sending a memo: “The classic French novel is about adultery, and Lana Turner in her private life carries sexual implications of an adulterous life. You will stay within the Production Code if you cast another actress of more dignified appeal, perhaps Greer Garson or Jennifer Jones.”

  Jones got the role.

  For creation of the film’s lavish gowns, Berman hired the well-known costume designer, Adrian, knowing that he’d devise some of the most spectacular outfits ever seen on a movie screen.

  Adrian opted to dress Lamarr in “high camp” costumes long before that term was invented. In her most famous scene, she appears in show-stopping headgear so heavy she could hardly walk, despite instructions from the director to appear, at least, to “float down the steps.”

  Lana’s final scene in Ziegfeld Girl depicts a boozy Sheila descending a grand staircase with all the majesty she can muster.

  Midway down the stairs, she hesitates for a moment with her fragile hand on the banister. At the newel post, she collapses and takes a fatal downward plunge to her death.

  Preview audiences, however, didn’t like her dying. In the re-edited version, it’s left up to the audience to determine her fate.

  Lamarr later lamented to Lana, “I couldn’t see where I was going because of the blinding lights. To keep me from falling over with that elaborate head-dress, a board was fastened to my back and my bosom was taped from behind. I felt like some religious penitent in the 10th Century walking in a torture procession.”

  As choreographer for the spectacular musical numbers, Berman hired the well-seasoned Busby Berkeley.

  Lana met Berkeley just at the time that his outsized musical numbers, which had enthralled Depression-era audiences, were becoming passé. She culled a lot of smart performance tips from him, especially about how to present herself regally as a showgirl. According to Lana, “Garland detested him, but I found him very sympathetic and deeply troubled.”

  Lana’s former high school boyfriend, Jackie Cooper, was assigned the role of her younger brother, although they were the same age. Their young romance was not discussed, and he was going steady with her girlfriend, Bonita Granville.

  At the beginning of the film, Sheila (Lana) was working as an elevator girl. She is plucked “out of the elevator shaft” to become a glamorous showgirl, and the movie traces her rise and fall through lavish production numbers in which she struts like a peacock.

  She was assigned many dramatic moments, including one in which she’s beaten up by a former boxer. In another, she accidentally plunges from the stage into the footlights in full view of the (horrified) opening night audience. There’s even a sickbed scene during which it becomes clear that her illness is a result of chronic alcoholism.

  After Sheila is fired from the Follies, she goes from bad to worse. To survive and to pay her liquor bill, she’s forced to sell her jewelry, after which she’s reduced to populating the seediest and filthiest of speakeasies.

  In her interpretation of a showgirl (Susan Gallagher), Garland gets to belt out four numbers, including her most memorable song from the film, “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” She also gets to perform a spunky tropical number, “Minnie from Trinidad.”

  Many critics lamented the fact that Ziegfeld Girl had been shot in black and white. An oft-repeated line in reviews was that the movie “scr
eamed out for Technicolor.” Time magazine asserted that the film was a “glorification of Lana Turner.”

  “The part of Sheila is Lana Turner’s big chance—and she takes it,” wrote the critic for Kinematograph Weekly. “All the hopes, disillusionment, and the follies of youth are crystallized in her vital, memorable, glamorous, and appealing performance.” The New York Times reviewer claimed, “It is the perilously lovely Lana Turner who gets this department’s bouquet for a surprisingly solid good performance as the little girl from Flatbush.”

  ***

  In her role in the film as showgirl Sandra Kolter, Hedy Lamarr was married to Franz Kolter (as played by Philip Dorn), a struggling violinist. She is snapped up by the Follies and becomes the breadwinner of the family.

  Their marriage becomes complicated when she’s attracted to the show’s handsome headliner, Tony Martin, cast as Frank Merton. His marvelous voice rings out, with the approval of thousands of fans, much to the chagrin and jealousy of Hedy’s unemployed husband.

  Martin’s show-stopping musical hit, which became an American classic, is “You Stepped Out of a Dream.”

  Lamarr would become a formidable rival of Lana’s both on and off the screen. One reporter wrote, “The so-called friendship between Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner is cordial on the surface, but hostility lurks under the skin.”

  Lana had been fascinated by the background of the Austrian beauty ever since she burst into fame after her appearance in the notorious German film, Ecstasy (1933), in which she runs nude through a forest.

  In her distant past, Hedy Kiesler (her original name) had been married to Fritz Mandl, the Austrian munitions magnate, a friend of both Mussolini and Hitler. Although a closeted Jew, he supplied munitions to the Nazis.

  Rumors circulated that Mandl had pimped his gorgeous wife to both dictators. Unknown to Hitler, Lamarr was also Jewish, the daughter of a wealthy Viennesebanker.

  Fame in America came for Lamarr when she co-starred with Charles Boyer in Algiers (1939). Sleek, slim, and chic, with her jet-black hair parted in the middle, her stunning face framed by picture hats, snoods, and turbans, she photographed beautifully.

  The friendship between Lana and Lamarr might have been different if Lana had not rebuffed her sexual advances. Lamarr was bisexual, as she admitted candidly in her latter-day memoirs, Ecstasy and Me.

  Lana told her, “I’m not that kind of girl.”

  In New York City in the 1970s, Lamarr and author Darwin Porter had each hired the same literary agent, Jay Garon, and occasionally ran into each other at parties. Once, she discussed Lana, though in veiled terms. “I told her that my bosom was not as large as hers, but I also reminded her that Venus de Milo had small breasts. Lana was very hostile to me, calling me distant and reserved, although those terms might also be applied to her. I tried to be friends with her, but she was always chasing after some man. On the set of Ziegfeld Girl, they included both Tony Martin and James Stewart.”

  In the 1940s, Lana and Lamarr would often co-star together with the same male stars: Robert Young, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor, Bob Hope, and Ray Milland. “On the set of Ziegfeld Girl, I was having an affair with James Stewart,” Lamarr said. “He and I had just made Come Live With Me (1941). Lana lured him away before she fell for Tony Martin.”

  “I think Lana got really mad at me,” Hedy continued, “when I practically pulled that handsome devil, Errol Flynn, from her arms. I also kept luring George Montgomery and Clark Gable from her. Then, Howard Hughes told me that I was much better at oral sex than she was. That was his favorite sexual expression.”

  “I also seduced John Garfield when we made Tortilla Flat in 1942. That was three years before Lana got him when they co-starred together in The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

  ***

  Even though he’d been given star billing in Ziegfeld Girl, James Stewart was disappointed with his minor role. “Lana Turner should have had star billing instead of being in fourth position. My role as her bootlegging boyfriend should have assigned me to fourth place, following Judy Garland and Hedy Lamarr. Any number of actors could have played my part.”

  “However, on reflection, it did have the greatest fringe benefits of any movie being shot at MGM,” he told Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, and others.

  No doubt, he was referring to his seduction of both Hedy and Lana during the filming of Ziegfeld Girl.” The director, Robert Z. Leonard, said, “I know for a fact that he spent three hours in Hedy’s dressing room one afternoon when I didn’t need them on camera. Not only that, but I saw him driving away from the studio an hour or so later with Lana. They returned the next morning in the same car. There was little doubt he’d spent the night with her, and that satisfied grin on his face proved my case.”

  It may have seemed unlikely to his fans, but this lanky actor, who stood six feet three and weighed only 140 pounds of mumbling, stammering flesh, was one of the great Lotharios of Hollywood, perhaps even topping the record of Errol Flynn over at Warner Brothers.

  Hailing from the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and before he settled down and married divorcée Gloria McLean, Stewart had blazed a trail of seductions through Hollywood.

  Lana onscreen (top photo) and off-screen (lower photo) with James Stewart. Rumors of an affair between James Stewart and Lana swept Hollywood when they co-starred in Ziegfeld Girl. There was even speculation that the couple might get married after her divorce from Artie Shaw was finalized.

  His affair with Lamarr had begun after their completion of the 1941 picture, Come Live With Me.

  Hedda Hopper didn’t publish the fact in her column, but privately told friends that over a period of time, Stewart had kept a diary of his conquests. Before he finally got married, the diary contained entries on 263 (the exact number) of glamor girls he’d seduced, including many of the extras and bit players in his movies.

  “Those were the years,” Stewart recalled in later life. “Jean, Rita, Marlene, Grace, Loretta, Hedy, Lana, to name a few. My bachelor years, let me tell you, were wonderful, just wonderful. Boy, did I have a good time polluting myself.” [That was his word for having a sexual climax.]

  In addition to her offscreen role as his lover, Lana found she could confide in Stewart. At times, she treated him like an older brother instead of a lover. She spoke of the pain of aborting Artie Shaw’s child, and he shared his own experience of having “a kid of my own,” also aborted. [While making Destry Rides Again (1939), with Marlene Dietrich, she became pregnant, and their child was later aborted.]

  While filming Ziegfeld Girl, Stewart was also simultaneously making another film, Pot o’ Gold, forcing him to run from one set to the other. One day, when he arrived to film a scene in Ziegfeld Girl, director Leonard told him that Lana’s character of Sheila had been killed.

  In his stammering way, he asked Leonard, “Bring me up to date on the script, would you? Did I kill her?”

  Lana telephoned Louella Parsons to deny the story of her romance with Stewart. “I admire Jimmy very much as an actor,” she said. “He’s always marvelous in every scene he’s called upon to play. What a fine actor. But, romantically speaking, he is just not the type of man that I go for—at least not in that way.”

  She had a reason for calling Parsons to deny any involvement with Stewart. Actually, when she made that call, “Hedy was taking care of Jimmy’s needs. I had moved on.”

  She had fallen in love with the fifth lead in the picture: Tony Martin.

  ***

  Lana’s involvement with Tony Martin began one afternoon when Milton Weiss, from the MGM Publicity Department, approached him and asked if he’d accompany one of two MGM beauties to a world premiere. “Your options include either Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner,” Weiss said. “The one you pick is entirely up to you, kid.”

  “That’s like asking a cat if he’d like a white mouse or brown,” Martin later wrote in a memoir. “They’re both tasty. It’s just a question of which flavor he prefers. I could have the most beautiful
brunette in the world or the most beautiful blonde in the world. What the hell…I’ll take Lana.”

  Later that day, he discussed his choice with Lillian Burns, MGM’s drama coach. “I hear you’re taking out the blonde bombshell. Watch yourself! Don’t get hung up on her.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he vowed.

  “Of course you can,” she answered. “That’s what Napoléon said before he marched off to Waterloo.”

  As flashbulbs popped that Saturday night, Lana and Martin made a glamorous appearance at the premiere. After the screening, and after a visit to Ciro’s nightclub, he spent the night on her satin sheets. “By Sunday morning, when I woke up with her, I forgot my depression about how another blonde, Alice Faye, had recently divorced me.”

  He wrote, “If you have a bruised ego, like I did following my divorce, let Lana Turner tend to you. She’s the best little ego-builder I’ve ever seen. She had a way of looking at you, her eyes never wandering from yours. You could drown yourself in her blue eyes. She swept me off my feet, and I mean that, literally.”

  Lana had been attracted to Martin ever since she and Mildred had seen him in the 1936 movie, Follow the Fleet, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in which he’d been cast as a sailor. Lana had also purchased some of his recordings, marketed through Decca records.

  A bachelor again, Martin had become a member of what a loosely organized group of single, promiscuous men collectively known as “The Stud Farm” in Hollywood of the early 1940s. “The Studs” randomly included, among others, Henry Fonda; the playboy prince Aly Khan (who later married Rita Hayworth); the gigolo, Pat DiCicco (who was once famously married to heiress Gloria Vanderbilt); Cubby Broccoli (later, the producer of some of the James Bond films); or roommates Bruce Cabot and Errol Flynn. The notorious playboy of the Dominican Republic, Porfirio Rubirosa, was a sometimes member, too.

  “Members of The Stud Farm got pursued by girls as much as we pursued them,” Martin said. “We weren’t hard to get. All of us were gay blades.”